Talk:Combat: Skill Combat
Ok,whats the deal with the extra damage thing? I don't see anything like that in the equipment section? Matsci 19:56, 18 April 2009 (UTC) Yeah, I wrote this version of combat from scratch. In fact, the other version (Which was the only version before I signed up) was also written from scratch, rather than procured from Jason Mical's prototype. As I wrote it from scratch, I didn't feel comfortable updating the other pages to make them match my submission. The "Extra Damage" was simply a means of generating a random damage range. With a relatively stable weapon such as a cheap pistol, you would assign an extra damage value of 1 to the basic damage rating of 3, meaning the pistol will do 0-5 damage. A more unstable weapon, like say an Alien Blaster, could potentially have an extra damage value of 10 and thus do between 20-70 damage. So the reason it's not on any other pages is because I didn't want to force this down people's throats. If you want, you can work out the extra damage values for weapons on the other page (Or just ignore that part of the rules). Cjc7988 16:34, 20 April 2009 (UTC) Think it's a good idea to write a rule about giving ammo to your friend in combat. So you spend 1 AP and leave the ammo on his (or adjacent) hex; he spends 1AP to pick it up. Or something like that.Oreolek 16:06, 24 June 2009 (UTC) A few thoughts on the combat system as it stands I think this system is really quite smart, however I can see a few areas where this is far from finished. If those niggles were ironed out, I'd want to use this system in preference to the other alternatives and several other professional systems. I have a few ideas and questions here, I've only read this system through a few times but a few things seem to be missing. This is going to be quite a long essay, but I'd hope it'd either become a to do list or basis for a few ideas. Largely I've identified a problem, and suggested a solution, however the suggestions are just that. The problems are things that, as a gamer, I would feel don't make sense. Like improving skills in weapons only allowing you to land some shots which likely won't even break threshold at higher levels. The "bonus damage" system is quite nice, though it's probably the most glaring problem. Unfortunately it means that taking more skill in weapons provides hugely diminishing returns. If you have 150% you're already paying a lot more per skill point, sure, it lets you hit power armoured enemy putting 10ap into dodging behind a rock, but that extra 25% that are landing aren't doing anything. It means that in lore terms, a great marksman will not make more shots to weak spots but will turn a few misses into grazes. Which doesn't feel right. A great marksman will land tonnes of attacks on weak spots. It might instead be worth basing the bonus or penalty on how far under the hit you rolled. Of course this would eliminate hugely penalised shots but that sounds good to me. Perhaps at *just* making a shot to say... 15% in you get a one step penalty, then the next 15% you get a normal hit and then every 15% in you will deal more and more damage. This means skilled characters are literally more dangerous with their weapon rather than just pointing the gun in the right direction and hoping for the best. This would redefine criticals, but perhaps if you just add the base stat to the damage in addition to the bonus and base damage, when it falls within the critical range, this will keep criticals relevant, perhaps making them a little more frightening by adding an additional step of bonus damage might help (and prevent people making a pot shot, landing a critical but getting d4+AG-2 damage damage or something embarrassing, which could result in 0 damage critical if the shooter has a low stat or high bonus figure). Secondly, on that subject, as it's not been implemented it might be worth considering the penalty/bonus carefully. Weapons like darts, which hurt but aren't particularly nasty if they stick in flesh but piercing a lung or eye might have a low damage but high bonus. That's fine however some weapons lead to blood loss and pain wherever they hit but can be especially nasty, be careful not to apply a high bonus when high base is the solution. Right, moving along to threshold. I understand the concept from my days on fallout 2, however it's not covered here. An explanation of how threshold and armour penetration works would be good, as well as any damage reduction over threshold. Effectively a section on how armour works. Once this is established you could add threshold figures to armour, if the D20 version doesn't use the figures they can be ignored. The coverage of an armour is not listed anywhere either. Perhaps stats for various versions of armour might help. Combat armour or power armour are full body suits with helmet options, leather might be a full suit, or a jacket, or just a vest? Metal could be as much or little as the wearer decides and so different weights for how much they cover might be useful. (as well as potential variants, reinforced leather could be a trenchcoat with metal plates in the pocket, or it could be a body suit with hardened and threated sections over vital areas). As far as penetration works, this is not clear in fallout and isn't here. It might be worth covering. It would need to be balanced, I mean an AP shell will make light work of metal armour, but a power armoured BOS warrior is still not going to have his body tank reduced to nothing more than shiny clothes because someone fired a single 10mm AP round. Sure it's less likely to glance off... But there needs to be a trade off. Either an accuracy penalty, lower base damage or whatever and then perhaps it ignores x of the threshold and then x% of post threshold reduction. All this is hinted at in the Jim the raider example but not really explained. It's up to the reader to extrapolate. That is, it's not clear how thresholds work, what each letter in the armour on the equipment page means, how ap rounds work, and what the "resistance" percentages actually do. Then there's burst fire. It's not bad rule but it has a couple of niggles. Again, it doesn't scale well to skill (which admittedly it doesn't do much in real life, but that said, all skill does is allow you to turn a miss into 1 hit, rather than increasing the number of hits), it doesn't make a full 100% hit more likely, and it should. Rolling an attack for each shot is a no no, perhaps adding the skill/10 to the % of hits landed would help (perhaps adding the range modifier before dividing by 10). With hits over 100% meaning that the % over 100 get their damage bonus applied once. There's also no room for criticals. It might be worth just assuming that x% of the hits, where x is luck, land. for any fractions then you can always roll % on the fraction. For example, 5% luck, you fire 20 round and 70% hit. That means 14 rounds hit the first target. 5% of 14 is 70% so 70% chance for one critical. So a bullet with d4 base damage and 1 modifier being fired by someone with 200% skill, who rolls a 90 while firing 20 rounds, and has 5% luck would be as follows. He'd land 18 on the first target, with 20*(90+20-100)*90% hitting at +1 bonus. Meaning he'd land 16 normal hits of D4 and 2 with D4+1. On top of this, he has a 90% chance of scoring a critical hit with one round. On top of this there is threshold and burst. Assuming threshold stops x% is it applied to the burst total damage? or each shot? If you apply it to the total, it says that basically if you hit a well armoured enemy with enough shots, no matter how laughable, this will start hurting them as if they are naked after x shots. On the other hand, a volley of minigun shells will pose more of a threat than the same amount fired at 3 second intervals, to most targets. Even power armour will buckle and bend as shots hit it like supersonic steel rain. On top of this, some shots may find a weak spot or the like. I'm not sure what the solution is here. The two simple options are apply it to every shot, or apply it to total damage, but both are fairly flawed and make burst weapons good at killing armoured targets when they shouldn't be, or just utterly pointless on armoured targets. Perhaps if the threshold is x, applying it to x shots, before applying it to additional shots but reducing it by one point per shot. With normal hits, then hits at one bonus then critical hits, blocked in that order. The idea here is that a brotherhood paladin (assuming he'll be a high level character with a decent level of endurance too) isn't going to have to run away from people with assault rifles, but that he has to think carefully about that raider with a minigun, because they will eventually wear him down. Lastly, range, the range rules are fairly nice, however rather than using 3% as a fixed multiplier it might be giving weapons a multiplier per hex. Shotguns might be 5%, because they're devastating up close and pathetic at long range. Snipe rifles might end up closer to 1% because you can hit a target half a mile away but they are unweildy up close. Though that's just an idea and may be entirely unnecessary. This again, could always be optional. I assume that the nature of these rules makes certain rules optional but it might be worth tagging ones which are outstandingly so (ie will not break other rules if you ignore them, like aiming for eyes/forehead/neck instead of head only or changing the range modifiers) I know that's a lot of food for thought, some of it may just be thrown out, but I feel it's worth considering some of these questions. Oh and I want to emphasise again I like this system a lot, I just think it lacks polish in a few areas. I presume it's still work in progress, but hopefully these ideas will get the ball rolling or fill some gaps in.N44444 12:10, 17 August 2009 (UTC) To N44444, regarding constructive suggestions You're right about the random damage thing, it does need to be more dependant on the skill of the attacker. My concern was that the ranges would be too difficult to determine, but I suppose that's a big concern with any new system. So I'll change it to this: For the first 15% below the required roll to hit, the attack is a graze (Does Base -Extra Damage). For each step of 15% above that, an Extra Damage value is added again. So 30% or more beyond required does Base damage, 45% does Base + Extra, 60% does Base + 2xExtra, etc. To fix the criticals... well.. here's the rub. I've had criticals in Fallout 1 that did absolutely no damage. But those are no fun at all, so here's what we'll do. A critical does at minimum Base + Extra damage (Meaning even if it's a graze, it still counts as a good hit), + the stat associated with the weapon. So for small guns, that's usually AG. Concerning weapon damage, the Skill Combat system doesn't roll for damage. The roll is determined by how you hit. So a Handgun might do a Base of 15, whereas an Alien Blaster might do a Base of 60. That doesn't mean you roll 1d10 + 1d10/2 for damage, it means that if you hit, the Base value is 15. This also applies to burst attacks, so you don't have to worry about rolling damage twelve times. I don't know a whole lot about round types, outside of the fact that AP rounds pass through armor more easily and JHP rounds leave big cavities after entering the body. I guess to fix that I would apply a damage bonus and armor penalty (For JHP) or damage penalty and armor bonus (For AP) by gun. So Jim's 10mm pistol might get +3 base damage for using JHP, but he's suffer a penalty to skill of say -5%. Like I stated in the previous discussion, I'm a little loathe to shove this system down the throats of the PNP community, so I did not apply any of the necessary equipment attributes to the Equipment page. Critical with Burst is determined with the first roll, and is just bonus damage. So rolling a critical with a Minigun would add Endurance to the total damage inflicted. If each bullet does 3 damage, a target is hit with 12 bullets, and the attacker's EN is 7, the total damage is 3x12 + 7 or 43 damage. For the burst attack, I like that Luck% of the bullets hit. You're also correct that having a high skill could still mean only one bullet hits... something I had overlooked. Maybe one quarter of your Big Guns skill translates to bullets that will automatically hit. So a BoS Knight with Big Guns 200 would hit with at least 50% of the bullets, even if he only rolled 2. In fact, I like that a lot... I'll work that in. You were asking about armor too, yes? Armor applies a penalty to the attacker's skill based on coverage and damage type. Bullets are physical, so any armor that protects against physical attacks would subtract its value from the attacker's skill. A Deathclaw using unarmed on Jim's covered chest would suffer -5% to Unarmed for that attack. If, however, an Enclave soldier fired a plasma weapon at his chest, he would recieve no protection (As leather has no penalty for Plamsa-type attacks). Armor reduces damage indirectly by making a hit less effective. Again, I didn't really go into too much depth about equipment, because I was hesitant to force changes. Maybe I should start a "skill equipment" page and work from there. But not today. For now I'll work on updating the page with your suggestions, though it may take me a while (As changed rules change examples). Cjc7988 18:31, 28 August 2009 (UTC) EDIT: Oops, forgot about that Kinetic Damage reduction thing. I can't honestly remember how that works, I'll have to look into that. EDIT EDIT: Ahh, I see now. In the Jason Mical PnP file, armors had a set damage reduction. It seems the internet adaptation of that base has grown into "percentage damage reduction". Here's how it works. Protective gear has both an AC rating (Which makes it harder for the attacks to get through) and resistance ratings (Which reduce damage by that percentage). For example, a set of Power Armor has AC 30 and physical resistance 55%. That means that attackers both suffer a skill penalty to hit, as well as have damage reduced to 45% potential capacity (Rounded up, I'd assume). I think that has a grave flaw (It becomes nearly impossible to kill a well-armored foe), so you and I should come up with a better way to manage the armor system, either by providing different AC values for different types of damage or by some new means entirely. Until we can come up with something better, I'll leave the armor section as it is. Cjc7988 00:38, 29 August 2009 (UTC) Armour my experience In fallout 3 it's just a % reduction. In the earlier games it felt like (I've lost my disks lately, this makes me sad) like there was a flat reduction for sure, however it also listed a %. There may have been one then the other. I know that in the suit of armour you could just walk in and take in Navarro and the hammer there, I could stroll up to New Reno and wipe every pimp, mafioso and scumbag off the streets and out of every building and be back on full health after one stim pack. Most hits landed but hit for 0, while bursts with tommy guns (one of the weaker burst weapons if memory served) would sometimes leave a nick. I believe it literally applied AC, threshold, and then % reduction in a row. This made power armour exponentially awesome, but actually meant even picking up leather or metal made a significant difference in durability. I guess if sticking to the original rules is the goal we may wish to do this. We want to really balance the "Paladin can flatten a town without a scratch" with ensuring that the system doesn't end up basically being 2 games. With and without power armour. On top of this there's the community to please so leaving this talk here, saving old rules somewhere in case they hate them etc etc, are probably smart. The rules for AP ammo (especially in combination with burst) might help. I supposed in my head I have this idea that power armour is still worth a lot that even with AP ammo, that paladin is going to go toe to toe with most enemy and win. But if they lay a well prepared ambush have superior numbers semi decent armour of their own and position, he's a gonner. I guess I'm trying to say it's probably the bridge to narrow that gap with. Alternatively just using the % works. It weakens power armour a lot as 45% reduction, while a lot doesn't render the person a walking tank. In fallout 3 I definately felt that power armour, while powerful wasn't the game changer it felt like in the earlier games. More balanced that way I guess but it did feel... wrong given the lore. I think to make it work, you'd need to make sure that the rules allow things to make sense. If you're loathe to play with item stats then fiddle the rules to suit them. To me that's allowing light armour to stop pathetic shots and reduce the incoming damage from lighter attacks a lot but rendering them near irrelevant against something hefty, while meaning that power armour is unthreatened by light attacks, but still have enough vulnerabilities so as to ensure you don't have to travel half the wasteland and find a weapon rarer than the armour to defeat it. As I said, balance, common sense and the community may not all be sated and it may be deciding which to let go. N44444 01:27, 29 August 2009 (UTC) Lingering Dangers of Combat I want to go into the more lasting concerns a Waster faces in combat, such as burning damage, limb severing, and poisons. Should I try to tack it on the bottom of this page, or add a new Combat page to Chapter 3? I haven't got much yet, but I've decided that poisons should do damage to limbs but not HP (Like the Dart Gun does in Fallout 3). Cjc7988 21:19, 30 August 2009 (UTC) Poisons are a broad and exciting variety, or that's what most game designers think. But honestly they're just more bloat. When everything in place steamlining is a good idea. Having poisons just deal damage to where they hit (randomise if not aimed) in a temporary manner means you just need poison onset, duration, damage. This would turn poisons into a distinct and different sort of attack without having 15 types to track. A lucky headshot with poison could run someone's day but in lore terms that happened to the BoS. You would be able to then just say have the damage poison does, after an onset, and the duration. If you want to allow poisoned players a chance to fight it, you could allow them to apply a stimpack before the poison kicks in to reduce the damage not already taken. But this may be too much complexity. Perhaps just saying it applies x damage per time section for y time sections then the damage clears up in 24 hours might be the best way to do it. Then poison just needs "Onset:3 minutes. 4 damage/minute for 1 hour". Say all poison clears up within 24 hours. That way if someone gets poisoned somewhere squishy they can apply stimpacks before their head runs out of HP and they die. You would then need to work out where it hits. Or just make poison do damage to areas but not to your HP total or kill you. Removes some realism. Or you could just have a"fatal", "not fatal" tag. Fatal poisons can kill you with localised damage and subtract from your HP total (or even could just kill you if applied to an area which kills you when it loses x hp like your head but not if it's say.. an arm and not affect hp) while non fatal cannot kill it just cripples. "Onset 3 minutes 4 damage/minute for 1 hour not fatal" is basically anesthetic, "Onset 3 minutes 4/damage minute for 1hour fatal" means it will kill you if your head takes too much poison damage without treatment. The doctor or first aid skills could be used to lower damage. Perhaps first aid could reduce the damage or increase the poison resist drastically per tick, by say.. sucking the poison out and reducing the amount left in the body. All this needs considering. Should it kill? Should it just be anesthetic? how does treating it various ways work?" that's more than enough complexity already. I think simplifying poison is something every RPG system needs to do. N44444 12:02, 31 August 2009 (UTC) I really like the fatal/not fatal thing. Non-fatal poison inflicts damage to limbs, but no damage to health; it cripples by paralysis. Fatal poison inflicts damage to both HP and limbs, potentially fatal if it deals enough damage. Untargeted attacks can only cripple major body sections, not specific parts. So being stung by a radscorpion with a quick shot won't cause your jugular vein to drain out, even if it ends up hitting in the head. Because poison can be so devastating, unless it is aimed it usually does not strike the arms or head. Certain poisons might be designed to target a particular portion of the body (Like the legs), so in that case the poison would specify which part it hits. This poison cannot be aimed. I'll add a section about "Poisons" to Equipment: Alternate Rules when I get a chance. Now I have to ask about something else... mainly catching fire? How fast and how long should a character burn when exposed to flames (By explosives or flamethrower)? Cjc7988 15:56, 31 August 2009 (UTC) I think paralytic effects would never kill despite the localised effects perhaps? Even if it says "jugular drains" that can't happen from numbing... Poison is fairly rare in fallout outside radscorpion influenced things. But fatal poison might be good for manufactured poison or poisoned arrows used by bandits or snakes or the like. As for fire, only incendary rather than high force explosives will cause fire. I think that players in armour which is made of metal should get an increased chance not to catch fire though. Or perhaps you could just apply the reduction on the appropriate damage type. It'd need to be balanced so power armoured characters rarely worry about fire but someone in little to no armour is going to take moderate damage. Fire damage should be moderate, perhaps certain creatures (giant insects) should take a lot more damage but few people actually die from burning to death unless tied down and soaked in petrol. So it should be less damage than a blast of flamethrower. But someone who doesn't try to put themselves out will eventually die. Perhaps you could drop and roll, with a chance to put it out for each AP spent, but the penalty for getting up still present it's still a pain to do so. Obviously dropping into a puddle or jumping into water should help a lot. If not guarantee that it goes out. If a player does nothing I like the idea of them having a luck % chance for it to just go out, but that may be overly complex (something to tag as optional. I like the idea of having several optional rules. Tag then as consistent and part of the rules but optional to those looking to streamline things. This and perhaps the sub locations in body parts make sense to me. Rules which work, make sense but aren't going to break the game if the players ignore them. N44444 16:14, 31 August 2009 (UTC) Streamlining Skill Combat I've been thinking about it for a while now and Skill Combat has a few shortfalls that slow it to a crawl. With new ideas from Fallout New Vegas I'm ready to make some changes to this system, and I want feedback from users who intend to use the Skill Combat system (Otherwise I'm just blathering on for no reason). Proposed Changes to social interactions I'm throwing out Judgment Class and Detection Class, and replacing them with more logical and cross-equipment systems. Instead of Detection Class I will be adding a Noise Level to armor (just like guns have a noise level which penalizes stealth checks). The noise level of your armor will penalize your stealth attempts, but the noise level of an opponent's armor will act as a bonus (If their armor is louder than yours, they aren't going to be able to hear you over their own boot-steps. This also means it will be easier to sneak past an opponent who is firing a weapon at something else, because the gunfire occludes the noise you may make walking by. Judgment Class will be discarded and replaced with Faction Association. For parties that are neutral to a particular group, Faction Association does nothing. It acts as a bonus to social checks when interacting with favored parties. And it works as a penalty when interacting with inhabitants that have a distaste for the particular faction. You're probably wondering how that's any different from Judgment Class. Well, on the surface it is not. However, making the armor have a faction association instead of a straight positive/negative association means you can benefit from wearing a disguise. Plus, we will be able to apply Faction Associations to other equipment if we want to (though I don't know why we would). Proposed Changes to Limb Damage Assigning health to limbs is a character sheet nightmare. It may work well in a computer or video game, but it's too much to track on paper, and the formulas to calculate limb health frankly suck. I want to come up with a method that uses percentages, but I have yet to come up with any ideas on how to implement such a system. Still, I have a few ideas. Attacks against a general target hit a specific body part depending on how well the attack succeeds (based on the aptitude, just like the poison chart up above. Well... maybe not as cruel as the poison chart above). The damage inflicted is also inflicted to the condition of the body part it strikes, though it would be subject to modifiers. Torso: Same as damage inflicted. To reduce a torso to crippling status, 100 damage has to be inflicted. Legs: Double damage inflicted. It takes 50 damage to cripple a leg. Arms: Double damage inflicted. Head: Triple damage inflicted. It takes 34 damage to cripple the head. Sub-regions also have a percentage of condition, but it falls twice as quickly as the region it is associated with. So a 1 point hit to the Forehead would reduce its condition by 6% (Damage to the forehead is also damage to the Head, which means the Head suffers a 9% loss of condition). This means attacking subregions would cripple the body region first. This concerns me, but I haven't thought of a solution yet. Suggestions? Limbs would not cripple right away, but they do not recover very quickly (1% of utility a day unless treated by a doctor or by someone with sufficient medical proficiency. And even then...). Oh, and one more thing. Subregions never suffer damage from a wild swing (non-aimed attack). Proposed Changes to Damage Calculation Damage resistance as a percentage is nice because it means armor is useful in some form against every kind of attack. And Damage resistance is awful because you have to take the damage you inflict, multiply it by the percentage of resistance, and then subtract the result from the original hit (X - %X = Damage inflicted). This is a total waste of time, so I'm going to abandon the percentage-based Damage resistance for the much faster Damage Threshold. Armor will have a rating for the different types of damage you can suffer, and that rating is subtracted from the damage inflicted. Period. There are some issues with this, of course, the main one being the possibility of invulnerable enemies (those with DT so high the players cannot ever inflict damage). For this reason, every time you strike with an attack, you always inflict at least 1 Extra Damage from your weapon after damage reduction (This does not include grazing hits). I'm a little shaky on this solution too, which is why I'm asking here. ...Well, that's what I've got for now. Any thoughts? Cjc7988 04:02, October 22, 2010 (UTC) What is Judgement Class? Under the "Jim the Raider" header, there is a statistic called "Judgement Class". Quote, "Judgment Class (JC) 3(CH) +2 (Leather Jacket) = 5". However, there is no such secondary statistic in the Character Creation section. Please, help me understand. TFM the Scribe (talk) 23:53, June 24, 2018 (UTC)